Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Corruption

This story is really quite shocking. German health experts, who have downplayed the dangers of smoking, have been taking secret kickbacks from the tobacco industry for years. These "health experts" were such strong opponents of the anti-smoking lobby, that at least one of them equated the anti-smoking lobby to nazism.

...Four of the country's top medical research scientists had received millions of Deutschmarks for publishing biased reports about smoking during the 1980s and early 1990s. ...the four were funded for years by the German Association of Cigarette Manufacturers, mainly via innocuous-sounding medical foundations in an attempt by the industry to play down the dangers of smoking.Professor von Troschke was said to have received more than DM700,000 for publishing his research, which included a report entitled the "psycho-sociological uses of smoking" in which he dismissed claims that smoking was addictive.[one was] described as an active opponent of discrimination against smokers who used a caricature of a smoker with a "sort of Jewish star" pinned on his breast to illustrate the "pogrom-mentality" of the anti-smoking lobby.The German branch of the WHO said the close relationship between health experts and the tobacco industry had effectively blocked attempts to curb smoking in Germany for the past two decades.

3 Comments:

This is only slightly worse than the situation in the united states: Efforts allegedly undertaken by Tobacco to hide this information include the termination and destruction of Philip Morris research regarding nicotine's addictive properties. For example, in the early 1980s researchers working at a Philip Morris laboratory in Richmond confirmed that nicotine demonstrated addictive qualities and that the laboratory research animals self-administered the substance by pressing levers to obtain nicotine. Less than a year after a briefing to top Philip Morris executives on these findings by the director of the research, Dr. Victor J. DeNoble, Philip Morris representatives instructed the researchers to stop work, to kill all the laboratory animals, to turn in their security badges, and to withdraw a paper on the addictive qualities of nicotine that had been accepted for publication by a scientific journal. Philip Morris then closed the laboratory, fired the researchers, forced them to agree to remain quiet about their work, and threatened them with legal action if they published their findings. Blue Cross v. Philip Morris, 113 F.Supp.2d 345.